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State Bank of Pakistan has slashed the discount rate by 100 basis points, report said on Saturday. At a press conference here Saturday, Governor SBP Syed Saleem Raza announced the monetary policy. He announced that the SBP has decided to slash the discount rate by 100 basis points. “The SBP has cut the discount rate by one percentage points from the current 14 per cent,” Raza said. The governor said GDP ratio reaches 2.1 pc. He said foreign exchange reserves improved sharply and stood at $9.1 billion. The SBP has cut the discount rate by one percentage points from the current 14 per cent. It had cut the rate by one percentage point in April this year from 15 to 14 per cent. The central bank also changed the interest rate mechanism to bring transparency in Repurchase Offered (repo) rate as well as reverse repo rate as recommended by the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

The KSE 100-index could muster nominal 14 points on Wednesday as investors preferred booking profit for the second consecutive day while benchmark closed the day at 8,058 points. The KSE sustained a decent surge during the session mainly due to positive activity in main board banking stocks, confirmation of MCB-RBS transaction and whispers of consistency in earnings likely to be announced by NBP. Besides the banking stocks, cement, textile and oil & gas exploration stocks witnessed stock swapping, wherein the stocks trading at higher multiples were switched with those trading at comparatively low multiples, thus having a neutral to positive impact on the index, besides providing trading opportunities to the market men as reflected by decent turnover. “Rise in dollar reserve of the country due to release of third tranche by IMF did allow the local currency to find stability. Besides actions being undertaken by the authorities to reduce creation of artificial demand of dollar is like